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You may remember a post from the time my friend Rae-Anne Montague—professor of library and information science at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa—and I presented on developing queer/library alliances at the American Association of School Librarians National Conference in November. On June 6, Rae and I again spoke on some of the same topics at the Children’s Literature Hawai‘i Seventeenth Biennial Conference at Chaminade University in Honolulu during a session called “A Queer Library Alliance for Young People: Using Books with LGBTQ content.” We wanted to provide information about that state of queer issues and materials—especially in libraries and especially with regards to local concerns in Hawai‘i—and how libraries, community organizations, teachers, and parents can select materials and work with community partnerships to improve the lives of young people whose lives are impacted by discrimination of LGBTQ folks.

The conference was absolutely fantastic. We attended other sessions at the conference, including a paper presentation about the ways that picture book adaptations of mo‘olelo from the 1970s both subvert and reinforce settler colonial lenses, a talk introducing works that blend elements of Japanese manga and Native Hawaiian culture, and a workshop on teaching peace and social justice to kids using books. CLH does some pretty amazing work, and we were happy to join them.

Here’s the abstract from our talk:

This session includes three sections. Firstly, we review options for selecting materials with Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer/Questioning (GLBTQ) content to support personal and community goals. Secondly, we look at challenges to providing access to queer materials. Finally, we consider possibilities to develop collections and programming with GLBTQ content aligned with emerging needs of children and young adults. Presenters will offer ideas and incorporate examples to encourage participants to share knowledge and engage in open discussion throughout the session.

Slides from our talk (PowerPoint and PDF), as well as a nonfiction bibliography handout generously provided by Christine Jenkins and Michael Cart, are available for sharing! I think our talk was useful for several people who attended the conference, and we hope that you find the slides useful, too. We’ve also got a photo of us from our session, sharing books that we’d particularly wanted to recommend.

Yang Luo is a PhD student at GSLIS UIUC who studies the history of children’s libraries in China. Ever since she successfully defended her dissertation proposal last spring, I’d been anxious to hear more about the work that she’s been doing. Plans for an interview (conducted under the auspices of the Center for Children’s Books) were put on hold when I found out that Yang would be conducting field research in China this past summer. I’m delighted to say that I’ve finally had a chance to speak more thoroughly with Yang about her research to feature it through the CCB. Though it’s slated to be released with the CCB newsletter on December 2, you can read the full interview with Yang on the CCB website. Here are some highlights from the interview:

Yang says of her research, “I’m specifically looking at the time period from 1912-1937. I begin with 1912 because that year marks the foundation of a new Republic of China after hundreds of years of imperial rule. I end with 1937, at the dawn of the Sino-Japanese War. I’m interested in the development and genesis of children’s libraries during this time, and my initial investigation has found several factors during this time period—modern education reform, the public library movement, the Republic’s investment in child welfare, influence of Western librarianship, the appearance of children’s rooms and children’s literature—that converge to form children’s libraries in the early twentieth century.”

She says, “As China pays more attention to youth services today—we’re seeing more programs and libraries for young people being opened—I hope my research will answer the first question we should ask: ‘Where did we come from? How did we get here?'”

Yang says she draws her inspiration from Hu Shi, an advocate for education reform and young people in China during the time period she’s interested in. He was greatly influenced by John Dewey, and I think he’s someone I’d like to draw inspiration from as well. Yang shared this quote during our interview:

“It is not a disgrace for a nation to lack a navy or an army. It is only a disgrace for a nation to lack public libraries, museums, and art galleries. Our people must get rid of this kind of disgrace.”

On November 15, I had the opportunity to present alongside Rae-Anne Montague, currently assistant dean for student affairs at GSLIS University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign/soon to be assistant professor at the LIS program at University of Hawaii Manoa, at the American Association of School Librarians 16th National Conference. Our session examined incorporating materials and programming with LGBTQ content into school libraries. Here’s the abstract from our presentation:

This session includes three sections. Firstly, we review options for selecting materials with Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer/Questioning (GLBTQ) content to support curricular and personal goals. Secondly, we look at challenges to providing access to resources. Finally, we consider possibilities to develop collections and programming with GLBTQ content aligned with community needs. We will offer ideas and incorporate examples to encourage participants to share knowledge and engage in open discussion throughout the session.

It’s really not that exciting because it’s just an ongoing class project, but there really is a lot of potentially valuable information for people who are interested in libraries, or young people, or any of those sorts of fun things. I thought I would share it with you.

If you are interested, I contributed content to pages on non-native speakers of English, LGBTQ youth, and multicultural literature for youth. But there are also super-rad pages with tons of information about youth services from an international standpoint, reference services for youth, and most anything else you can think of that has to do with young people and library services for them.

In other wiki news, the CU Wiki (for Champaign-Urbana) has launched, and it’s also a pretty nifty resource. Intended as a community informatics project to promote local knowledge and collaborative work with users across CU, it’s chock-full of interesting, locally created content. There’s information about my places of work, for example, as well as local businesses, and even local hauntings. The local wiki movement is, I think, an interesting one, and I’m looking forward to seeing how this one in particular pans out, since I’m here. Also, if they reach 120 users by December 6, they’ll be able to win free site hosting for a year. So, maybe you could help them out and create an account?

Wikis, man. They’re great.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

1. Also: “Forget the kiki, let’s have a bouba.” #undulycomplexgaylinguistjokes

The Progressive Librarians Guild has issued a statement on the Tuscon Unified School District’s actions regarding the banning of the Mexican American Studies program and the subsequent removal of books from classrooms. You can read it here.

What scares me most is the direct opposition to schools teaching youth to think critically about our nation’s history.